Aiming to Win Over Critics, SFMTA Spells Out Its Parking Policies on Paper

On Shotwell Street near 17th Street, three drivers apparently cruising for parking stopped at the sign of an opening parking spot (left). (The driver of the red car, seen through the silver car's windows, won.) This is one area where parking meters would be installed under an SFMTA plan to free up parking spaces. Photos: Aaron Bialick

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s embattled efforts to put a rational price on the city’s car parking supply by expanding parking meters have led the agency to develop a document [PDF] that, for the first time, lays out its parking policies in one place. SFMTA officials, who presented a draft to the SFMTA Board’s Policy and Governance Committee today, say the document is intended to clarify the agency’s goals and make its parking management decisions more transparent.

As Streetsblog has written, when parking is free or underpriced, spaces fill up, and drivers cruise around for a spot. That means more pollution, traffic congestion, gas consumption, wear on the roads, slower transit, more danger for people walking and biking, and fewer driving customers able to park near businesses.

The SFMTA’s plans to install parking meters in the Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, and northeast Mission neighborhoods ran into heavy opposition in January from the Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF), which was formed in opposition to the parking plan. Among the group’s wide-ranging complaints, it says the SFMTA performed poor outreach, and that some of the proposed locations for meters aren’t appropriate. The SFMTA delayed its metering plans to do more analysis and outreach and plans to hold community meetings later this year.

But whether ENUF’s members just don’t want to pay for parking (which they deny), or the group’s complaints are legitimate, one thing is clear: many members say they distrust the SFMTA when the agency says its goal is to properly manage its parking supply. Rather, it seems to many car-owning members, the SFMTA is simply after their money (even if the cost of free parking is externalized to the general public, and the meter expansion plans are supported by advocates like Livable City who don’t receive revenue from them). Mari Eliza, an organizer with ENUF, told the SF Chronicle this week that “people are really ready to fight back” against parking meter expansions. “The city is just going too far,” she said.

“Meters are appearing all over San Francisco,” ENUF’s website says. “Next, the meters will be on your street in front of your home.”

In response to the insistent opposition to SFPark, the SFMTA’s promising pilot program to test out demand-responsive meters which accept credit cards (and can even have lower rates than conventional meters), the agency removed SFPark from the meter expansion in those neighborhoods. By adjusting prices according to demand, SFPark’s goal is to generally keep one space open on every block. Instead, the SFMTA is developing a plan which will only include conventional parking meters.

While the new document doesn’t actually change any policies or practices, SFPark manager Jay Primus called it “a really positive step forward.”

“This mundane document, like the parking census, is actually very exciting,” said Primus. “This helps the MTA communicate how, where, and why it uses different parking management strategies, it increases the transparency of its parking management decisions, and it explains how those decisions are consistent with the MTA’s goals.”

How many of these drivers in Potrero Hill are circling for parking?

To create the “effective, efficient, and safe transportation system” called for in the City Charter, the document says the SFMTA’s policy is to manage parking in pursuit of four goals:

Improve safety for all road users. Reduce circling and double-parking, lessening hazards for pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers presented by distracted drivers looking for parking.

The document also lists a number of principles which it follows in managing parking. Here are a few (check out pg. 4 of the document [PDF] for more):

Limited right of way should be well-used. Maintaining a minimum level of parking availability is critical for delivering the SFMTA’s goals for parking and transportation and is a core measure of parking management success. When a minimum level of availability is achieved, it is easier to find a parking space, drivers double park and circle less, access to businesses, and public safety are improved, as is transit performance.

Maintaining a minimum level of availability creates a desirable level of turnover. Parking turnover is a consequence of maintaining parking availability. On blocks with low parking demand, availability can be maintained with little turnover. Conversely, blocks with high parking demand require more turnover in order to maintain a minimum level of availability. Thus, the desirable amount of turnover can vary block to block and will result from achieving a minimum level of parking availability.

Parking policies are designed to encourage travel by public transit and sustainable modes of transportation. The SFMTA manages parking to prioritize public transit, walking, bicycling, and the needs of paratransit and commercial deliveries. City policy notes that “parking policies for areas well served by public transit shall be designed to encourage travel by public transit and alternative transportation” and that “decisions regarding the use of limited public street and sidewalk space shall encourage the use of public rights of way by pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit, and shall strive to reduce traffic and improve public health and safety.”

The document lays out a range of guidelines for where to use meters, residential parking permits (RPPs), time limits, and color curb regulations. Lauren Mattern, manager of the SFMTA’s eastern neighborhood parking management plans, said the document would set clear policies for which of those to use on blocks with mixed-use buildings like “live-work” lofts, where the differentiation between residence and businesses can be a grey area — one of the major issues of contention with ENUF.

Whether the document will help appease ENUF is unclear. In discussions with Streetsblog in April, Tony Kelly of the Potrero Hill Boosters Association insisted that he and members of ENUF agree with the need for parking management, but take issue with adding meters to some mixed-use blocks where they didn’t think the demand was high enough. However, ENUF spokesperson John Lum said he didn’t see how meters increase turnover, and that “making one neighborhood more expensive to park in for the people who live and work here, for no added benefit, is tacitly unfair.” (Lum also opposed bike lanes on 17th Street that removed some parking spaces.)

17th Street next to the Jackson playground.

ENUF’s website says it is conducting its own survey of parking demand in the neighborhood which it expects “will result in a more tailored parking plan that meets the real needs of our neighborhoods rather than the one-size-fits-all plan to blanket the areas with parking meters.”

On ENUF’s email list, members discussing the document questioned the SFMTA’s motives. “The usual MO of MTA has been to print appeasing public policy, and then to aggressively do whatever they want to do without listening to anybody else,” one member wrote.

Some also seemed to think the document would change the RPP program, which gives permit-holding residents priority for free curbside parking by imposing time limits (the document only describes the system that’s been in place for decades). Although ENUF has called for the creation of RPP zones in place of meters (they’re initiated by petition), Primus said the program has been ineffective in creating parking turnover and encouraging residents to use other transport modes. Enforcing RPP is also a drain on the SFMTA’s parking enforcement staff, who must make multiple rounds and mark tires with chalk to gauge how long a car is parked. SFMTA staff said it is reviewing the RPP program and may add changes to it in the policy document next year, along with more specific policies on the use of time limits.

Primus said the document was emailed to distribution lists this week, has been presented to the SFMTA Citizens Advisory Committee, and is still under review by city agencies before it’s set to go up for approval by the SFMTA Board of Directors on September 18.

Andy – your analysis re:taxes is very nice slight of hand. Sales taxes represent less than 25% of all taxes/fees taken in by the state. So with your motor vehicle related taxes being less than the majority, that leaves us with less than 10% of the state budget coming from those taxes.

The next leap you made is that assuming that all the money spent in the state on roads comes from the state budget. Not true. Federal grants come in to do all sorts of projects on the state and local level. Zero dollars for those grants come from sales taxes. Zero dollars for those grants for local projects come from Federal Gas Taxes. Zero. All of Obama’s stimulus money that went into road projects? Paid for with bonds that will be repaid from the general fund a.k.a. corporate and personal income taxes.

Andy Chow

You guys are just mixing up concepts. I never disputed that user fees paid by drivers do not completely pay for the infrastructure to support automobiles, but that you’re lumping other non-user fees/taxes that drivers pay to be something that is paid only by non-drivers.

All of a sudden you guy go completely conservative (you pay your own costs) when pretty much everything in transportation (may be with the exception of freight railroads) are socialized. You would be right if I were to say that we should not support transit and bike/ped because they can’t be financially self sufficient like roads, but that’s not what I advocate.

Only 13% is expected to come from federal sources, with 46% to come locally. More than half of the expenditure 51% is for transit operation. Road/highway maintenance only made up 21%. Only 5% of the cost to support road/highway expansion, with 14% for transit expansion.

The cost of driving is indeed high personally and socially, but the reality is that most people see car access/ownership to be a quality of life improvement, and are willing to pay the price of that. Lower income folks are OK get into debt to own a car but don’t think it is worth the price of a bike even if were a fraction of a used car. Some people who are more environmentally conscious choose driving Prius, Volt, or Leaf rather than take transit or bike.

When it comes to parking and other social policies, we have to remember that we live in a democracy. While parking a vehicle on the street is using occupying public property, most of the members of the public also own cars. The City Hall is not PG&E or Union Pacific Railroad.

mikesonn

“Lower income folks are OK get into debt to own a car but don’t think it is worth the price of a bike even if were a fraction of a used car.”

This furthers your argument how? That we, as a society, force people into debt because we’ve built an environment so unwelcoming to any other form of transportation outside of the private automobile? That’s democracy? In a post-Citizens United world, maybe it is.

Andy Chow

The point is that a shift in travel mode isn’t going to change overnight, or in a single year.

Policies that are more extreme against automobiles are not going to be accepted, especially when there’s no carrots attached (transit improvement, car sharing, etc).

In a democratic society, the majority can be “wrong.” The clearest example is the approval of Prop 8 4 years ago, and it has nothing to do with Citizens United either.

mikesonn

What “extreme” policies against automobiles are you talking about? Charging for parking is “extreme”?

Anonymous

@014d815e337305dccb0b861fe6cdb3e3:disqus wrote: “Policies that are more extreme against automobiles are not going to be accepted, especially when there’s no carrots attached (transit improvement, car sharing, etc).”

There are tons of carrots: reduced air pollution and green house gas emissions, reduced obesity (which leads to heart disease, the top killer in the US), reduced wars needed to protect oil supplies, reduced sprawl and their contribution to loss of biodiversity, safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists, reduced deaths from car accidents, reduced noise, increased support of local business (since you can’t go as far walking, bicycling, and taking public transit), and increased sense of community. Oh, and a planet left to live in. How much better carrots can you ask for?

Andy Chow

The carrots you stated are not individualized and are not immediate. That has been the problem all along. Most of these benefits are valid but are not sufficient to convert someone driving to not driving. Not many people consider social impacts when making personal decisions, at least not all the time.

Parking meters are seen as extreme in certain areas because some people see it as a revenue source and they don’t think parking is a problem in their area. The carrot of faster Muni is one of those things that are not individualized and immediate.

mikesonn

“The carrot of faster Muni is one of those things that are not individualized and immediate.”

Muni is slow, in large part, because of traffic. Traffic caused by people choosing to drive in private automobiles to free, or very very cheap, parking. And because said parking is free, or so cheap, there is very little turn over which causes the drivers to circle for parking causing more traffic congestion further slowing Muni.

The stick is the carrot.

Anonymous

@014d815e337305dccb0b861fe6cdb3e3:disqus wrote: “The
carrots you stated are not individualized and are not immediate. That
has been the problem all along. Most of these benefits are valid but are
not sufficient to convert someone driving to not driving. Not many
people consider social impacts when making personal decisions, at least
not all the time.”

Agreed (mostly), and that is the problem! We have not thought about the long-term impacts of our actions, hence we are in the mess we are in. It’s time we start thinking about them and stop acting like anything beyond how much money I spend in the next year or two matters. Building good public transit, livable streets, good personal and community health: these things are *huge* projects that take decades, and there is no way around that. Just because people don’t get any money in their pocket in the next year (even though they will lost it all and much more in the long-term) doesn’t mane the goal is not worthy. We have neglected public transit, cycling, and walking at the expense of cars for decades, and it’s going to take at least a couple decades to undo that. It doesn’t matter if people don’t like that, that is how it is and we need to deal with the mess we’ve created.

Now, I said I only agreed “mostly”, because some of the things do have immediate payoff. For example, improving your health because you walk or cycle is an instant payoff with clear financial benefits.

“Parking meters are seen as extreme in certain areas because some
people see it as a revenue source and they don’t think parking is a
problem in their area. The carrot of faster Muni is one of those things
that are not individualized and immediate.”Disagree. A faster Muni is exactly a personal, immediate benefit. I get to work faster immediately!We as a society — as Americans — need to start thinking long-term (not just about transportation, but everything). It is absolutely nonsense to pretend like goals are not worthy just because they don’t have an immediate payoff while they do have a massive, destructive long-term effect. This attitude must change.

Andy Chow

Can anyone be able to quantify time travel savings if Muni is not delayed by on street parking as much with parking meters? Particularly on a trip level?

If it is something in the level of seconds, I don’t think that’s an individual/immediate benefits. A few minutes could be. We have to remember that a trip could be significantly longer if someone in wheelchair is taking the bus or there’s some kind of detour/special events.

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